kinda interesting that he does call out Adam Schiff though.

======

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

By Uri Berliner

April 9, 2024

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You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.

Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.

Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.

When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency.

Politics also intruded into NPR’s Covid coverage, most notably in reporting on the origin of the pandemic. One of the most dismal aspects of Covid journalism is how quickly it defaulted to ideological story lines. For example, there was Team Natural Origin—supporting the hypothesis that the virus came from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. And on the other side, Team Lab Leak, leaning into the idea that the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

The lab leak theory came in for rough treatment almost immediately, dismissed as racist or a right-wing conspiracy theory. Anthony Fauci and former NIH head Francis Collins, representing the public health establishment, were its most notable critics. And that was enough for NPR. We became fervent members of Team Natural Origin, even declaring that the lab leak had been debunked by scientists.

But that wasn’t the case.

When word first broke of a mysterious virus in Wuhan, a number of leading virologists immediately suspected it could have leaked from a lab there conducting experiments on bat coronaviruses. This was in January 2020, during calmer moments before a global pandemic had been declared, and before fear spread and politics intruded.

Reporting on a possible lab leak soon became radioactive. Fauci and Collins apparently encouraged the March publication of an influential scientific paper known as “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Its authors wrote they didn’t believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But the lab leak hypothesis wouldn’t die. And understandably so. In private, even some of the scientists who penned the article dismissing it sounded a different tune. One of the authors, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist from Edinburgh University, wrote to his colleagues, “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”

Over the course of the pandemic, a number of investigative journalists made compelling, if not conclusive, cases for the lab leak. But at NPR, we weren’t about to swivel or even tiptoe away from the insistence with which we backed the natural origin story. We didn’t budge when the Energy Department—the federal agency with the most expertise about laboratories and biological research—concluded, albeit with low confidence, that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the emergence of the virus.

Instead, we introduced our coverage of that development on February 28, 2023, by asserting confidently that “the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin for the virus.”

When a colleague on our science desk was asked why they were so dismissive of the lab leak theory, the response was odd. The colleague compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again. But these two events were not even remotely related. Again, politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.

Uri Berliner near his home in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 2024. (Photo by Pete Kiehart for The Free Press)

I’m offering three examples of widely followed stories where I believe we faltered. Our coverage is out there in the public domain. Anyone can read or listen for themselves and make their own judgment. But to truly understand how independent journalism suffered at NPR, you need to step inside the organization.

You need to start with former CEO John Lansing. Lansing came to NPR in 2019 from the federally funded agency that oversees Voice of America. Like others who have served in the top job at NPR, he was hired primarily to raise money and to ensure good working relations with hundreds of member stations that acquire NPR’s programming.

After working mostly behind the scenes, Lansing became a more visible and forceful figure after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It was an anguished time in the newsroom, personally and professionally so for NPR staffers. Floyd’s murder, captured on video, changed both the conversation and the daily operations at NPR.

Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.

But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.

“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth. If, as NPR’s internal website suggested, the groups were simply a “great way to meet like-minded colleagues” and “help new employees feel included,” it would have been one thing.

But the role and standing of affinity groups, including those outside NPR, were more than that. They became a priority for NPR’s union, SAG-AFTRA—an item in collective bargaining. The current contract, in a section on DEI, requires NPR management to “keep up to date with current language and style guidance from journalism affinity groups” and to inform employees if language differs from the diktats of those groups. In such a case, the dispute could go before the DEI Accountability Committee.

In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.

Conflicts between workers and bosses, between labor and management, are common in workplaces. NPR has had its share. But what’s notable is the extent to which people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.

And this, I believe, is the most damaging development at NPR: the absence of viewpoint diversity.

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking.

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!”

And they wouldn’t stop there. They would mention their favorite host or one of those “driveway moments” where a story was so good you’d stay in your car until it finished.

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.

In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.”

For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations.

Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking.

Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came.

I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.

Which is a shame. Because for all the emphasis on our North Star, NPR’s news audience in recent years has become less diverse, not more so. Back in 2011, our audience leaned a bit to the left but roughly reflected America politically; now, the audience is cramped into a smaller, progressive silo.

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Even within our diminished audience, there’s evidence of trouble at the most basic level: trust.

In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that “3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic ‘trustworthy.’ ” Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about.

With declining ratings, sorry levels of trust, and an audience that has become less diverse over time, the trajectory for NPR is not promising. Two paths seem clear. We can keep doing what we’re doing, hoping it will all work out. Or we could start over, with the basic building blocks of journalism. We could face up to where we’ve gone wrong. News organizations don’t go in for that kind of reckoning. But there’s a good reason for NPR to be the first: we’re the ones with the word public in our name.

Despite our missteps at NPR, defunding isn’t the answer. As the country becomes more fractured, there’s still a need for a public institution where stories are told and viewpoints exchanged in good faith. Defunding, as a rebuke from Congress, wouldn’t change the journalism at NPR. That needs to come from within.

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor and reporter at NPR. His work has been recognized with a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Society of Professional Journalists New America Award, among others. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @uberliner.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567604)

Despite all the resources we’d devoted to building up our news audience among blacks and Hispanics, the numbers have barely budged. In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.

tbf crying, losing hope as he realizes the last bastion of whiteness in america is... public radio

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567614)

newsrooms have spent so much time shitting on their bread and butter (middle class whites in the suburbs) and catering to minorities by laying off middle aged journalism veterans and replacing them with younger, barely literate woke DEI types, but it's ultimately only sped up their demise.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567873)

===

Ms. Kollisch’s brief marriage in 1942 to Stanley Plastrik, who helped found Dissent magazine, ended in divorce. She later married Gert Berliner, an Abstract Expressionist artist and fellow refugee who was born in Berlin.

She and Mr. Berliner were among the founders and operators of Cafe Rienzi, a bohemian haunt in a former noodle factory on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village that was frequented by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac and Richard Wright in the early 1950s.

The couple moved to New Mexico, where he painted and she wrote while working as a cook at a uranium mine and as a social worker. There she gave birth to Uri, who is now an editor at NPR. He and a grandson are her only immediate survivors.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567860)

i just watched a young turks video earlier today. those two are trying. they are referring to the unprincipled as the "far left" in order to distinguish them from themselves.

i guess good luck to them, but what happens when libs try to be principled? ask david rubin. they end up being moderate republicans

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47583346)

Failing to name this person means he has not backed off one inch from the malfeasance he describes. This journalist, to believe the author, has renown on a media outlet that is partially funded by taxpayers under the threat of imprisonment.

And this journalist said, to witnesses, that he was using those public funds to further an individual partisan interest.

That's criminal, and as we see in NY, people face imprisonment over this. Concealing this person's identity is to stop being a journalist and to become a conspirator.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567648)

"best." "fair-minded." lol.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567664)

Cue his firing in 3,2,1…

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47567704)

====

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243755769/npr-journalist-uri-berliner-trust-diversity

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay, titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media, with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower. Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly. The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted, "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann. "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47570592)

Yes, I'm sure a newsroom with zero republicans "sounds like all of America"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47570651)

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann. "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47584193)

Jonathan Chait was getting some applause from conservatives for his new piece about censorship by libs --- but his entire complaint is the far left is shouting down the center left on the Gaza-Palestine issue.

iow, the impetus for the op-eds is "protect Israel from critics."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47570793)

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”

This also describes 99% of shitlib poasters.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47570816)

trump claimed he was 100% exonerated by the mueller report.

libs, as much as i hate them, correctly to some extent, said he didn't exonerate trump, but

"“The findings of the Department of Justice are a total and complete exoneration of the President of the United States,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

In reality, Mueller’s investigation left open the question of whether Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey and drafting an incomplete explanation about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign. That left it to the attorney general to decide. After consulting with DOJ officials, Barr said he and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, determined the evidence “is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”"

the recent durham report basically did fully exonerate trump and it was ignored because of that

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47583357)

oh and by the way Katherine Maher is an insane lib.

plus this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/style/katherine-maher-ashutosh-upreti-wedding.html

====

NPR EXTRA

From NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher: Thoughts on our mission and our work

APRIL 12, 20243:31 PM ET

The message below was sent by NPR's President and CEO to all staff:

Dear all,

This has been a long week. I'll apologize in advance for the length of this note, and for it being the first way so many of you hear from me on more substantive issues. Thanks for bearing with me, as there's a lot that should be said.

I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation.

NPR's service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week, in two distinct ways. The first was a critique of the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists. The second was a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.

Asking a question about whether we're living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.

It is deeply simplistic to assert that the diversity of America can be reduced to any particular set of beliefs, and faulty reasoning to infer that identity is determinative of one's thoughts or political leanings. Each of our colleagues are here because they are excellent, accomplished professionals with an intense commitment to our work: we are stronger because of the work we do together, and we owe each other our utmost respect. We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve.

NPR has some of the finest reporters, editors, and producers in journalism. Our reporting and programming is not only consistently recognized and rewarded for its quality, depth, and nuance; but at its best, it makes a profound difference in people's lives. Parents, patients, veterans, students, and so many more have directly benefited from the impact of our journalism. People come to work here because they want to report, and report deeply, in service to an informed public, and to do work that makes a difference.

This is the work of our people, and our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation. Given the very real challenges of covering the myriad perspectives, motivations, and interests of a nation of more than 330 million very different people, we succeed through our diversity. This is a bedrock institutional commitment, hard-won, and hard-protected.

We recognize that this work is a public trust, one established by Congress more than 50 years ago with the creation of the public broadcasting system. In order to hold that trust, we owe it our continued, rigorous accountability. When we are asked questions about who we serve and how that influences our editorial choices, we should be prepared to respond. It takes great strength to be comfortable with turning the eye of journalistic accountability inwards, but we are a news organization built on a foundation of robust editorial standards and practices, well-constructed to withstand the hardest of gazes.

It is true that our audiences have unquestionably changed over the course of the past two decades. There is much to be proud of here: through difficult, focused work, we have earned new trust from younger, more diverse audiences, particularly in our digital experiences. These audiences constitute new generations of listeners, are more representative of America, and our changing patterns of listening, viewing, and reading.

At the same time, we've seen some concerning changes: the diffusion of drivetime, an audience skewing further away in age from the general population, and significant changes in political affiliations have all been reflected in the changing composition of our broadcast radio audiences. Of course, some of these changes are representative of trends outside our control — but we owe it to our mission and public interest mandate to ask, what levers do we hold?

A common quality of exceptional organizations is humility and the ability to learn. We owe it to our public interest mandate to ask ourselves: could we serve more people, from broader audiences across America? Years ago we began asking this question as part of our North Star work to earn the trust of new audiences. And more recently, this is why the organization has taken up the call of audience data, awareness, and research: so we can better understand who we are serving, and who we are not.

Our initial research has shown that curiosity is the unifying throughline for people who enjoy NPR's journalism and programming. Curiosity to know more, to learn, to experience, to change. This is a compelling insight, as curiosity only further expands the universe of who we might serve. It's a cross-cutting trait, pretty universal to all people, and found in just about every demographic in every part of the nation.

As an organization, we must invest in the resources that will allow us to be as curious as the audiences we serve, and expand our efforts to understand how to serve our nation better. We recently completed in-depth qualitative research with a wide range of listeners across the country, learning in detail what they think about NPR and how they view our journalism. Over the next two years we plan to conduct audience research across our entire portfolio of programming, in order to give ourselves the insight we need to extend the depth and breadth of our service to the American public.

It is also essential that we listen closely to the insights and experiences of our colleagues at our 248 Member organizations. Their presence across America is foundational to our mission: serving and engaging audiences that are as diverse as our nation: urban and rural, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, often together in one community.

We will begin by implementing an idea that has been proposed for some time: establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement. These will serve as a venue for NPR newsroom leadership to hear directly from Member organization editorial leaders on how our journalism serves the needs of audiences in their communities, and a coordination mechanism for Network-wide editorial planning and newsgathering. We're starting right away: next week we plan to invite Members to join us for an initial scoping conversation.

And in the spirit of learning from our own work, we will introduce regular opportunities to connect what our research is telling us about our audiences to the practical application of how we're serving them. As part of the ongoing unification of our Content division, Interim Chief Content Officer, Edith Chapin, will establish a broad-based, rotating group that will meet monthly to review our coverage across all platforms. Some professions call this a retro, a braintrust, a 'crit,' or tuning session — this is an opportunity to take a break from the relentless pressure of the clock in order to reflect on how we're meeting our mandate, what we're catching and what we're missing, and learn from our colleagues in a climate of respectful, open-minded discussion.

The spirit of our founding newsroom and network was one of experimentation, creativity, and direct connection with our listeners across America. Our values are a direct outgrowth of this moment: the independence of a public trust, the responsibility to capture the voice and spirit of a nation, a willingness to push boundaries to tell the stories that matter. We're no strangers to change, continuously evolving as our network has grown, our programming has expanded, and our audiences have diversified — and as we look to a strategy that captures these values and opportunities, the future holds more change yet.

Two final thoughts on our mission:

I once heard missions like ours described as asymptotic — we can see our destination and we strive for it, but may never fully meet it. The value is in the continued effort: the challenge stretches on toward infinity and we follow, ever closer. Some people might find that exhausting. I suspect they don't work here. I suspect that you do because you find that challenge a means to constantly renew your work, and to reinfuse our mission with meaning as our audiences and world continues to change.

The strongest, most effective, and enduring missions are those that are owned far beyond the walls of their institution. Our staff, our Member stations, our donors, our listeners and readers, our ardent fans, even our loyal opposition all have a part to play: each of us come to the work because we believe in it, even as we each may have different perspectives on how we succeed. Every person I have met so far in my three weeks here has shown me how they live our mission every day, in their work and in their contributions to the community.

Continuing to uphold our excellence with confidence, having inclusive conversations that bridge perspectives, and learning more about the audiences we serve in order to continue to grow and thrive, adding more light to the illumination of who we are as a shared body public: I look forward to how we will do this work together.

Warmly,

Katherine

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582239)

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1267624457897537536

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

White silence is complicity. If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.

6:09 PM · Jun 1, 2020

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582458)

See new posts

Conversation

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

May 30, 2020

CNN is talking about the tragedy of damage to iconic retail zones and shoe stores in LA.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.

11:05 PM · May 30, 2020

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1266974026053767169

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582461)

https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/01/nprs-new-ceo-katherine-maher-75472014.jpg?quality=75&strip=all

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582472)

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Jan 20, 2020

“America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations. https://google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/361631/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582482)

@krmaher

I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.

2:05 PM · Jan 20, 2020

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47582485)

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/08/01/fashion/00MINI-MaherUpreti-02/00MINI-MaherUpreti-02-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

https://archive.ph/T7Bm4

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47584237)

implement quarterly meetings

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47583337)

the work that actually needs doing is prescription, not mere diagnosis. What are you going to do to fix this?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47584183)

no doubt that TDS made the situation even worse.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47584717)

Just like Ackman doesn't give a shit about DEI outside of issues affecting Jews/Israel

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47585094)

Author: richard clock

well written piece but i get the feeling he's only angry now because they are critical of israel

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47584190)

https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1308149490369662976

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/08/01/fashion/00MINI-MaherUpreti-02/00MINI-MaherUpreti-02-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47585584)

See new posts

Conversation

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

Some people* ended up running the whole shebang. President, chair of the board. (*When I say people, I mean men. In the early aughts it was at least 80% male, and that’s probably generous.)

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

A more senior exec who’d been through the same global traineeship program told me the role was originally meant to “keep the brown fingers out of the till.”

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

They’d send their Oxbridge educated best and brightest out to Hong Kong; and from there, to run their Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American holdings.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

I was also told that as recently as the 1990s they had a policy that if you wanted to marry a citizen from your country of duty posting, you used to have to write to HQ for approval. You either got it, or you were relocated. An informal practice, I’m sure.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

I was advised by a more senior female exec that as a woman, I ought to seek a husband who wouldn’t mind being supported. An artist, perhaps. Someone with co-equal ambition would be a drag on my career, make me less competitive.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

This was the same institution which then declined me for a travel-intensive job after I confirmed I had a significant other.

Quote

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 10, 2020

In 2006, I was up for an audit job covering the entire Asian region out of Hong Kong. When I mentioned I had a boyfriend, the role disappeared. I was told that it would not be compatible with travel.

Last year I did 200k miles and 150+ nights on the road.

Get out/the way.

Show more

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

At a cocktail party at the top of Canary Wharf HQ, I asked the chair of the whole global operation if they’d consider deprecating the global management program. Surely, I asked, there must be great local talent to develop instead of parachuting folks like me in.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

It was like I’d poached his big game cub. Utterly not done.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

I was never exposed to any true malfeasance. In fact, I worked in Canada on retail banking products (aka, mortgages) the year before the subprime collapse. Thanks to Canadian banking regs, we didn’t do NINJA loans or anything like that. It was all on the up and up.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

·

Sep 21, 2020

Same in Germany, where I did commercial loans for major, reputable German companies. The kinds best associated with transport. Nothing shady at all.

Katherine Maher

@krmaher

But the culture of the institution was so thoroughly steeped in neo-colonial values, led by men who believed they had the power to shape the financial systems of entire nations. It was truly fascinating, and very weird.

2:02 PM · Sep 21, 2020

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47585592)

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1779632231226503196

reminder, our tax dollars go to this woman and her journalism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47586257)

Gary

@plzbepatient

The CEO of NPR had an article written about her wedding in the NYT. Her parents also had an article written about their wedding in the NYT in 1980. She is just “of” that class. Hard to really expect her to be any different than she is.

11:50 AM · Apr 15, 2024

·

9,420

Views

Cato

@ichthys30

·

5h

Sadly her kids will never have an NYT article about their weddings because she is in her 40s and childless (many such cases)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47586438)

https://twitter.com/TheFP/status/1780218177168838711?t=e2zP9sBkGne7TmqqFFy8dA&s=19

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47587033)

NPR CEO: not true! we welcome diverse views! btw, Uri, you're fired for that view.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47587226)

right wingers would never have the guts

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47587467)

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1780492620634202153

“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47589863)

don't these people understand that deleting this stuff is so fucking revealing of how duplicitous they are? she could have just been like "uh taken out of context, there's more there" and most people wouldn't have watched the video to find out. instead, but deleting it, she's admitting that it's embarrassing for her.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47589873)

and yet she now heads A NEWS ORGANIZATION. lol. a news organization that goes by the name of "national public".

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47589880)

-- Taibbi

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47589874)

is this bitch CIA or what? who else gets to bounce around gigs like that?

LOLWTF:

Maher grew up in Wilton, Connecticut,[2] and attended Wilton High School.[9] After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that developed her interest in the Middle East.[10] Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d'études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia.

dad was a goldman exec.

internship at council on foreign relations right out of college.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47589938)

https://twitter.com/uberliner/status/1780610524411048183

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47590018)

He just ceded the territory, will light out for some "centrist" outlet that nobody listens to, and be forgotten in 24 hours.

In picking this fight, he needed to be ready to actually kill

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47590036)

2. Get replaced by frizzy-hair

3. Declare moral victory

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47590120)

pathetic

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47590167)

https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1780635242170028359

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47592722)

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1c5i2ip/npr_suspends_veteran_editor_uri_berliner_for/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47592747)

so what he did was useful but he's still morally awful.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47594008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKYMTOAssXc&list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_&index=9

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47595079)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8QD6pv46hM&rco=1

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47595084)

Rufo looks at Maher's affinity for color revolutions and CIA campaigns.

he also notes that Maher's rather surprising elevation to the head of Wiki came at a time when the CIA and other players stopped viewing the internet as a tool for color revolutions and began viewing the internet as a threat.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/katherine-mahers-color-revolution

Christopher F. Rufo

Katherine Maher’s Color Revolution

The NPR boss is a symbol of regime change—foreign and domestic.

/ Eye on the News / The Social Order

Apr 24 2024

/ Share

The Color Revolution is restless. Beginning in the former Soviet republics in the early 2000s, it moved along the coast of North Africa with the so-called Arab Spring in the 2010s, and, into the current decade, has spread further.

The ostensible purpose of Color Revolutions—named after the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, and Tulip Revolution in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively—is to replace authoritarian regimes with Western liberal democracies. American and European intelligence services are often heavily involved in these revolutions, with ambitions not only to spread modern ideologies but also to undermine geopolitical opponents.

The West’s favored methods of supporting Color Revolutions include fomenting dissent, organizing activists through social media, promoting student movements, and unleashing domestic unrest on the streets. Americans hold varying opinions on such efforts, but what many don’t realize is that they occur not only overseas but also here in the United States. The summer of rioting following the death of George Floyd, which ushered in the new DEI regime, was in many ways a domestic Color Revolution, advanced by progressive NGOs, media entities, and political actors.

A minor figure in these movements, a woman named Katherine Maher, has recently come to greater prominence. Maher was involved in the wave of Color Revolutions that took place in North Africa in the 2010s, and she supported the post-George Floyd upheavals in the United States in the 2020s. She was also the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and was just recently named the new CEO of National Public Radio.

At NPR, Maher has already been embroiled in controversy. Longtime editor Uri Berliner, who has now resigned, accused her of left-wing bias and suppressing dissent. Following these accusations, I did extensive reporting demonstrating that Maher has a troubling history of arguing against the notion of objective truth and supporting censorship in the name of democracy.

Now I have gathered additional facts that raise new questions about Maher’s role as a regime-change agent, both foreign and domestic. She has brought the Color Revolution home to America.

In the first part of her career, Maher seemed to follow the wave of U.S.-backed revolutions through the Middle East and North Africa.

She had the perfect background for this kind of work. She held a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University and had studied in Cairo and Damascus. And, at every step, she had managed to connect with powerful institutions, repeating their slogans and climbing their ranks. (Maher did not respond to request for comment.)

During the volatile Arab Spring period, under a constantly rotating series of NGO affiliations, Maher went to multiple countries that were undergoing U.S.-backed regime change. Beginning in 2011, for example, she traveled multiple times to Tunisia, working with regime-change activists and government officials. In 2012, she traveled to a strategic city on the Turkey-Syria border, which had become a base for Western-backed opposition to Bashar al-Assad. That same year, she traveled to Libya, where the U.S. had just overthrown strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

During much of 2011, Maher worked for the National Democratic Institute, a government-funded NGO with deep connections to U.S. intelligence and the Democratic Party’s foreign policy machine. The organization was “set up to do independently what CIA had done covertly worldwide,” says national security analyst J. Michael Waller. While initially some distance supposedly existed between NDI and the intelligence services, that relationship has devolved back to “the gray zone,” per Waller, and it appears that they often work in concert. “NDI is an instrument of Samantha Power and the global revolution elements of the Obama team,” Waller explains. “It has gone along with, and been significant parts of, color revolutions around the world. It is very much a regime-change actor.”

American adversaries such as China agree with this sentiment and have accused NDI of being a “second CIA.” Some nations, fearing American interference, have banned NDI from operating in their territories. In 2012, for example, Egypt accused NDI and other organizations of serving as unregistered foreign agents and working “in coordination” with U.S. intelligence to subvert the Egyptian state.

During her time at NDI, Katherine Maher was “part of a revolutionary vanguard movement,” says Waller.

I have obtained access to several now-deleted blog posts written by Maher during this period, which support Waller’s thesis and shed additional light on her work at NDI. In August 2011, Maher wrote a post about NDI’s work in Libya, which was then in the midst of its revolution: Gaddafi was still alive and U.S.-backed rebels had set up a headquarters in the city of Benghazi. During the conflict, Maher wrote, “a member of the NDI Middle East team walked into our office and asked how difficult it would be to wire downtown Benghazi” for Internet communications.

This was not mere democratic institution-building but a plan to provide communications to Libya’s political and military opposition, in the middle of a civil war. Maher seemed to suggest that restoring connectivity was essential to overthrowing Gaddafi’s government. (NDI did not end up executing the plan, according to Maher; Internet was restored through other means.)

The Internet, Maher learned, was a key asset on the new battlefield. The primary lesson of the Arab Spring was that Western technology—social media, encrypted messaging, mobile connectivity—had become a powerful tool of regime change. Twitter, in particular, was an asset for dissidents in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere.

Over time, however, some of those dissidents grew skeptical of Maher, who seemed to be using the same platforms to penetrate activist and opposition circles. In 2016, after Maher became the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation—to the puzzlement of some observers—one of her Tunisia contacts accused her of working with the CIA. “Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent,” said Slim Amamou, a digital activist and cabinet minister in Tunisia’s transition government, who had spent a significant amount of time with her. “[S]he was constantly trying to get introduced in the activist social network.”

Maher responded defensively, shaming Amamou for supposedly turning against her, and denying the charge. “I’m not any sort of agent,” she said. “Don’t defame me.”

There is no way to discern whether Maher was an agent, asset, or otherwise connected with the CIA. But her official status, however interesting it may be to speculate about, is irrelevant. In practice, Maher was undoubtedly advancing the agenda of the national security apparatus and working to advance the agenda of the Color Revolution.

The promotion of “democracy,” however, does not stop overseas. A Color Revolution has now arrived on American shores, too.

Maher’s résumé provides us with a map of modern power, connecting political revolutions overseas with the cultural revolution here at home. She has been affiliated with key foreign policy and intelligence institutions: the Atlantic Council, World Economic Forum, State Department, World Bank, and Council on Foreign Relations. More recently, she has obtained power at several key strategic assets for the flow of information within the United States: CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, CEO of National Public Radio, and chairman of the board of the encrypted-messaging application Signal.

When Maher was selected as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, many members of the Wikipedia community expressed surprise. But seen through the prism of the Color Revolution, the online encyclopedia is a key strategic way station. The site defines the terms, shapes the narrative, and launders mostly left-wing political ideologies into the discourse, under the guise of “neutral knowledge.” Additionally, in recent years, it has served as training data for artificial intelligence, which then incorporates Wikipedia’s biases into its outputs.

Some suspect that intelligence services have used Wikipedia as a tool in the information war. “The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new,” co-founder Larry Sanger told me in an interview. But he suspects more is at play, noting that research as far back as 2007 suggests that the CIA may be manipulating the site’s entries. “We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.”

Maher, for her part, was not shy about her political agenda. As I have reported, during her tenure as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, she advanced a policy of censorship under the pretense of fighting “disinformation.” I wrote:

In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

Wikipedia is important because it shapes perception and closes the circle of information production. Wikipedia replicates left-wing news reporting, news reporting replicates left-wing Wikipedia entries, and artificial intelligence replicates both. It’s a closed loop that operates surreptitiously, using its reputation for unbiased knowledge as a cover for its own disinformation.

How does NPR fit into what we might call the American Color Revolution? It is another key component in our domestic culture war. NPR has formative power in many culture-shaping institutions and increasingly represents the voice of blue elites. It is state radio, in the Soviet sense: it produces propaganda to advance its own cultural power and move the nation toward a desired end-state.

Maher understood the power of media—and radio, in particular—early in her career. In 2010, according to a now-deleted blog post that I have obtained, Maher speculated that seizing control of radio could be a way to “Govern a Country.” The specific context of the post was the U.S.-supported revolution in the African nation of Cote d’Ivoire, where the incumbent president had refused to concede to a Western-backed candidate, sparking a civil war. Eventually, the opposition prevailed, took control of communications, and rules the country to this day. “Control over the flow of information in a closed society can be tantamount to control over the state,” Maher wrote.

While Maher was more descriptive than prescriptive in this 2010 blog post, the implication of what she described seems clear enough: control the narrative, control the regime. The production of media works in Cote d’Ivoire as it does in America; the difference is only a matter of scale and complexity.

The same principles of Color Revolution apply to the encrypted-messaging application Signal, where Maher currently serves as chairman of the board. Signal was originally funded, in part, by the government-backed Open Technology Fund, where Maher sits on the advisory council and which has deep connections with technologies used for regime change. According to some analysts, Signal’s purpose is to provide overseas activists with secure communications; it is, in the positive sense, a way to promote dissent and spread controversial political opinion.

On the surface, this appears to be a contradiction. Maher backed dissent abroad but suppressed it at home. She not only censored content at Wikipedia but also supported deplatforming then-President Donald Trump, who opposed the domestic revolution following the death of George Floyd. “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists,” Maher wrote on Twitter, after Trump was effectively removed from social media. “Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

This is not hypocrisy; it is the politics of friend and enemy. For Maher, “democracy” means the advancement of left-wing race and gender ideology all over the world. This requires elevating progressive dissidents overseas, while suppressing conservative dissidents at home. For partisans of Color Revolution, dissent and censorship are not in contradiction—they are two sides of the same coin.

It’s easy to understand Katherine Maher as a curriculum vitae—she has collected affiliations and positions, traversing the hierarchy of progressive culture—but it is harder to understand her as a human being.

Public information offers a likely clue. Maher grew up in an affluent, nearly all-white Connecticut town. Her father worked at the most prestigious firms on Wall Street and, according to family lore, her grandfather had been a spy in Europe. Her mother is a Democratic state senator in Connecticut and dutifully follows the party line; she supported Hillary Clinton for president, stands with Planned Parenthood, and donates to the ACLU.

I spoke with some of the people in Maher’s personal orbit, who have a further impression. Maher, in their telling, anyway, is immensely ambitious, calculating, and cold. She rose through the ranks of power and built a network of influential patrons, but never maintained close relationships, with some wondering whether she had any friends at all. She traveled constantly, built her Rolodex, and spoke alongside establishment players, such as former CIA director Michael Hayden, but her personal life was reportedly chaotic.

She had been through a series of relationships, apparently, and always disguised her ambition in the language of ideology—a means to power, rather than an authentic commitment. “That’s Katherine in a nutshell: the privileged white girl with a savior complex,” said one contact with knowledge of Maher’s personal life.

For the better part of her thirties, Maher had her sights on powerful men in the tech sector—a high-tech entrepreneur; an early Facebook employee—but also considered finding someone lesser as she approached 40. “I was advised by a more senior female exec that as a woman, I ought to seek a husband who wouldn’t mind being supported,” Maher wrote in 2020. “An artist, perhaps. Someone with co-equal ambition would be a drag on my career, make me less competitive.”

When Maher did get married, to corporate lawyer Ashutosh Upreti in 2023, she earned coverage in the New York Times, but it was hardly flattering. She had mistaken her first date for a job interview. “I thought he was more interested in being my general counsel than my date,” Maher told the newspaper. She had refused to answer his proposal for five weeks, before relenting. They eventually settled down and adopted a designer dog.

Maher, in public and in private, then, appears to be a vessel for power, with few original thoughts. But she has a charismatic appeal and is willing to do what it takes to turn power into more power—to the delight of the institutions that have orbited around her for the past 20 years. As Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told me: “It is getting to the point where you can’t accuse people like Katherine Maher of hypocrisy anymore, because they’re not being hypocritical. They’re actually saying it out loud: ‘We don’t really believe in this freedom stuff anyway.’”

Sanger, perhaps, is being naïve. The American Color Revolution does not exist to advance principles but to accumulate power and entrench ideologies. Freedom is a tool: sometimes it is helpful to the cause; sometimes it is an impediment. The evidence certainly suggests that this is how Katherine Maher sees the world.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5515267&forum_id=2#47606884)